


into the depths of the sea

by wreathed



Category: British Comedy RPF, Just Puddings (Web Series), Off Menu with Ed Gamble and James Acaster (Podcast)
Genre: Anal Sex, Friends to Lovers, Light Bondage, M/M, Masturbation, Sexual Fantasy, Shame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-08 04:45:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18887452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreathed/pseuds/wreathed
Summary: From the prompt: James Acaster, shame/guilt about sex





	into the depths of the sea

James isn’t quite sure when the idea moves from an errant thought he has one time to what he thinks about when he wakes from dreaming, when he’s dropping off to sleep, when he’s getting himself off and several other times in between. What’s an irrefutable fact is that this transition has happened, and that he’s rapidly becoming obsessed.

It’s wrong for him to want _this much_ to get fucked, he feels sure of that. No problem whatsoever with it for other people, but why would the desire only barrel into his life now? And usually, in his imagination, he can’t move: he’s been made to position himself so he’s offered up and vulnerable and not in control, face down and backside up and on his knees, wrists in front of him tight together. That feels wrong too.

He’s largely ceased trying to stop himself thinking about it by now, so useless the attempts have been, but as soon as his come has filled the grip of his own hand or washed down the drain of his shower he feels the same predictable, roiling shame over his lack of control, swiftly followed by shame over the needless shame he feels about it.

He never imagines anyone in particular with him — they’re always faceless, anonymous. What does that say about him as a person? That he’s so keen for it that he’ll give himself over to just anyone? That’s pretty degenerate, isn’t it?

But that’s not the worst thing, nor is how good his body (if not his mind) feels after release. The worst thing is this new, desperate hunger to feel as wanted and owned and adored as he does in his imagination. It makes him feel like a resolute and life-changing realisation has forced itself inside his brain and refuses to leave.

It’s disconcerting, and he needs to work out a way to get it out of his system and move on.

*

“I’ve realised,” Ed says over the phone one afternoon, against the noise of what sounds to James’s ears like dishes being moved out of the sink. They shouldn’t have been in the sink in the first place. They should have been on the worktop beside the sink. They don’t live together anymore, of course, and so Ed’s washing up arrangements aren’t currently James’s concern, but that doesn’t stop him being allowed to think about it.

James smiles with some satisfaction at the very distant sound of Ed swearing under his breath as another dislodged plate clatters down the line.

“I’ve realised,” Ed says again, the sounds of recalcitrant crockery having come to an end. “If I don’t move my used mug from the living room to the kitchen, it doesn’t move. You have to do things to make things happen.”

“So, you’ve finally grasped object permanence,” James says. “At the age of thirty-three.”

“Yeah. I’m a genius,” Ed says, but he’s starting to sound distracted by something. “Hey, do you fancy coming over?”

“I’ve got a gig in town in two hours,” James says, which is true. “I’ve really supposed to have already got going.”

“Alright,” Ed says easily, then pauses before speaking again. “Alright, well. Don’t be a stranger.”

“I’ll be as strange as I like, thank you very much.”

Ed ends the call on that, but James hears him start to laugh just before the line cuts out. 

*

James tries to free up headspace by watching some porn.

He feels terrible afterwards: guilty, and in one clip there had been rope restraints and, Jesus, this is only going to _add_ to his increasingly terrible list. This is not the solution to the problem.

He reverts to throwing himself into work, and quick shameful wanks and cold showers, but nothing ever makes the desire go away for long.

*

The next time Ed calls him, it’s two in the morning. James is in bed in a hotel room after a gig, looking up at the ceiling, not yet asleep. His usual fantasy is on his mind again, but he’s trying to ignore it and drift off, tensing and releasing all the muscles in his body from his toes upwards. He’s on his shoulders when his phone rings. He sighs, opens his eyes, checks to see who it is and then answers, rolling onto his front. 

“What?” James asks, face scrunching up in confusion, after thirty seconds or so of loud music, rustling sounds and, somewhere in there, Ed’s voice, barely distinguishable. He sounds smashed.

“Is that better?” Ed then says, and James tells him it is, because he can hear what Ed is saying now. The music sounds more distant.

“Are you alright?” James says, and James listens as Ed laughs and slurs that he’s out with a few people and he had been getting off with a girl, maybe called Sandra or Sarah, but she had disappeared and wasn’t it funny because this is the sort of thing that happened to James, usually?

 _Not_ all _the time_ , James thinks crossly, but he doesn’t say anything.

“When are you back in London?” Ed asks, tripping over some of the words. “What days are you free?”

“I don’t know,” James says. The background noise is making his head begin to throb. “I’m pretty busy. Wednesday? I’m back by then, and I haven’t got anything on. Drink some water.”

“Got it,” Ed says, but James doesn’t know which part of what he said Ed’s responding to — the water or the schedule. “Wish you were with us. I miss you.”

James splutters because Ed sounds so _earnest_ , but finds he wishes he could convey something along the same lines. “I’m back next week,” he says reasonably, gradually realising along with everyone else going on with his body that he now has a tight knot in his chest. “Have fun, mate. I’m going to get some sleep.”

“Boring,” drunk Ed sings-songs into the phone. “I’ve got tabs on you,” and abruptly hangs up. 

*

The next morning, James wakes up hard and, right before he comes into the grip of his own hand, whoever he imagines slamming into him hard and deep, holding him in place, is no longer unspecified. It turns out that’s the most significant problem of all.

*

Afterwards, James checks his phone to see that Ed had sent him a photo of an opened box of ibuprofen. James shoots back a few disapproving raised-eyebrow emojis and presses on with the day.

They message quite a bit after that, but only about the usual things like links to new restaurant openings and stupid tweets from fellow comedians. Nothing has changed, at least in reality, except James feels the panic rising whenever a notification pings on his phone. There’s no possible way Ed can know, but what if, somehow, he _does_?

Then it’s Wednesday night, and James is back in his flat. This time Ed’s calling after getting back from a gig himself, and he’s called to talk about, it seems, nothing in particular.

“As pleasant as this little chat has been,” James says, staring at his paused TV screen with a beer in hand, likely sounding a little rude. “Were you calling for any particular reason?”

“Yes. Would you like to come over? That’s if the sight of dirty dishes won’t offend your senses. They’re still there, you see.”

“It’s quite late.”

“Yes,” says Ed, but doesn’t elaborate.

“Alright,” James says, immediately half-regretting it, ending the call before Ed can say anything further, and all of a sudden he’s left alone with the bright nervous beat of his heart as he opens up the Uber app on his phone.

*

It’s the same as ever — it’s just Ed — yet James feels different, and outside of the possibility of James’s febrile imagination having gained magical thinking abilities, he’s unsure why. 

They’ve soon sunk a few whiskey sours between them, only enough for tipsiness, sitting side by side on Ed’s sofa, and Ed has got James onto… wait, how has Ed got him onto this? They had been talking about the podcast James had done recently where he’d been asked if he had any unusual fetishes, and Ed had kept on joking about it, pointing out that James hadn’t really given an answer — although he had been very funny — and James had said there had been something on his mind, but it wasn’t that extreme so it would hardly have been that interesting, and then Ed had asked, with a careful tip of his head, what it was, and then for some unfathomable reason James had mumbled—

“What, that’s it? You want to get tied up and fucked?” Ed says it so casually, but it makes something inside James crawl and burn like fire. “There’s videos on the internet of people… I don’t know, figging, or doing things so weird you don’t even know what they’re doing exists, and _that’s_ what you’ve been twisting up about?”

“It’s wrong to want it that much! It’s wrong to want anything that much. That kind of sex, it’s… It’s selfish.”

“You want it?” Ed says, softly, kindly. His face is quite close to James’s. James determines to ignore his tone. “You want it that much?”

“Yes, and don’t you bloody dare make fun of me for it, because—”

“It wouldn’t be selfish.”

“Sorry?”

“It wouldn’t be selfish because… I’ve been thinking about it too.”

“What? You want the same thing done to you?” At least they could bond over that, James thinks distantly. Maybe that’s what friends were bonding over these days and it was perfectly normal to platonically swap sexual fantasies or what have you.

Ed glares at James like he wants to hit him.

For a moment, James looks into Ed’s glaring, handsome face and imagines for a moment what would happen if his thoughts were a reflection of reality. Now would be when Ed would ram his forearm against James’s chest to push him back — James’s rate of breathing increases — and turn him over, their clothes magically disappearing, and— 

Instead, Ed leans forward and kisses him, and James thinks, dumbly, _oh_.

“You have to do things to make things happen,” Ed say, grinning against James’s cheek like he’s just pulled off some kind of rhetorical flourish. But James already feels too blindsided to make sense of it, and instead opts for shutting Ed up by kissing him back.

They keep kissing, soft and close, until James is hard and Ed efficiently takes off James’s shirt and James is under Ed, lying horizontal on the sofa, and James starts trying to grapple with whether it’s Ed, or James’s new obsession, or some combination of both that’s making him feel like this. He’s never been this direct with anyone — if he knew in advance he was going to be kissing Ed tonight, he would have never said what he’s been wanting — so he’s not sure exactly what’s going to happen, but surely he’d made getting to the next step relatively straightforward.

James starts to move to turn over, but Ed stops him with a firm grasp on his arm. (James swallows hard.)

“No. I want to see you,” Ed murmurs. 

“I don’t know,” James manages, scrunching his eyes closed before opening them again. He’s imagined it so many times it’s difficult to think about it another way. “That’d be quite intimate.”

“I’d say we’re already quite intimate, mate,” Ed gently suggests, looking as if he would be about to burst out laughing were he not being all noble by suppressing the urge not to. James can feel, with a nervous thrill, where Ed is hard against his thigh.

“You can laugh at me if you want,” James says, frowning, at this point jealous of anyone, even those outside this room, who were relaxed enough about whatever situation they were currently in that they were able to feel anything beyond the sense that they were about to break into a thousand pieces. 

“I’m going to tie your wrists above your head,” Ed tells him, and James feels an embarrassing shiver run through him. Ed kneels up, not breaking eye contact, looking down on him. “Then I’m going to take off the rest of your clothes. Then I’m going to get your legs apart. Don’t panic,” he says languidly, being all looming by looking down on James flat on his back. “I’d say you’re still suitably vulnerable in this position. And I think you’d rather see my face.”

“I’d rather forget about it, thanks,” James says miserably, blushing furiously, but his heart’s not in the lie.

“Come through to the bedroom,” Ed says, picking up James’s shirt from where he’d discarded it, and James feels himself blink slowly but goes along with it: he gets up, grabbing onto Ed’s wrist, and lets himself be led through. 

Ed kisses him again, hot and thrilling, then pushes James back onto the bed with his feet over the end, kneeling either side of him. Gradually at first, and then more firmly, Ed pushes James’s arms back above his head, watching with interest as James’s hips roll upwards, then uses James’s shirt to tie his wrists together until James can’t move his hands. Ed takes off James’s shoes, then unbuttons James’s trousers, pulling them down with his underwear and taking everything off along with his socks. 

“ _Ed_ ,” James squawks as Ed suddenly moves away and climbs off the bed.

“Give me a second, yeah? If you want me to fuck you. Do you want me to fuck you?”

“I’ve already told you I want you to fuck me,” James says irritably. “Don’t make me make your big head even bigger.”

James watches curiously (and somewhat awkwardly, as he has to turn his head to the side rather than lift it up) as Ed, shutting the drawer of his bedside table, finally starts taking off his own clothes. James has seen most of the body parts that are revealed to him before, but he’d never thought about them before in this context: never about how Ed’s arms and chest would feel around him, never about how his thick, toned thighs might feel against his own.

Then Ed takes off his boxers and James forgets to breathe for a moment. Ed’s cock is big and hard, shiny at the tip.

“Legs up,” Ed says, sly and matter-of-factly, getting back on the bed completely naked with a bottle of lube and a condom in hand, and James feels his stomach turn over. Ed grabs a pillow from the head of the bed and lifts James up to put it under him (has Ed done this _before_?, he wonders wildly). None of this had happened when James had thought it through before, but, he reminded himself, _this_ was real. Somehow.

Ed uncaps the bottle as he looks over James’s body with heated interest, and James has to close his eyes for a moment. When he opens them, Ed’s sat where James’s legs are open, watching him. He feels Ed’s cool, slippery fingers against him, and hadn’t considered how intimate this part might be by itself. He’s worried it might be too much, when it came down to it, but actually he finds himself shifting minutely downwards, trying to get Ed’s fingers in him. He feels shame not from how they are positioned, he supposes, but from the intensity of the want. Avarice.

Once Ed, who is now biting his lip in a way that really makes James want to kiss him again, gets his fingers in, James can’t stop making _noises_ , and is reminded every time he tries to shift his hands apart of all the ways he can’t move. Ed gets his other hand on James’s aching cock where it’s hard against his stomach and James cries out, realising how close he already is. He needs more, quick.

“You’re all worked up, aren’t you?” Ed says, although he sounds fairly far gone himself. Ed leans forward so he’s covering the whole of James’s body, fingers still inside him, and kisses James messily, tongue deep into his mouth. It makes James feel all floaty.

Then Ed pulls back again, fingers out (James squirms at the loss) to get the condom on. Ed looks at James carefully, face close once more, and lines himself up.

“Are you sure this is okay?” James asks, even though he can feel the hardness of Ed’s erection just outside him, ready to go, and he does want it, he knows he wants it, and if Ed says it’s—

“This is absolutely okay,” Ed says seriously. “This is much more than okay. Can I—?”

“Yeah,” James says, worrying less over, it turns out, about where Ed’s dick was right this second than the proximity of Ed’s face to his and how his brain felt about it. “Sure.”

Ed’s above him, over him, so James just stays still, can only stay still, a gentle pleasurable ache at his shoulders and his held-firm wrists, as Ed at last slowly fucks into him. It’s so much to feel at once. Ed is looking after him so well, his mouth slack in pleasure.

Then Ed shifts back a little so his hands are gripping the back of James’s thighs and that makes James moan, being held firm like that, and from how deep Ed’s now inside him; it feels unimaginably good in a way that means it must be bad bar how Ed’s looking at James while they’re like this.

James feels an emotional, blurry prick behind his eyes as he starts to let go.

“It’s okay, yeah?” Ed says, sounding reassuring and sleazy at the same time as he slides back in. “Who even knows it’s happening? It’s just us here. Only I know you’re getting fucked and loving it—” he trails off as he takes a deep breath and goes in again “—and it’s so, so fucking good, oh my god, and I need you to never stop,” even though that doesn’t make any sense because Ed’s the one who’s actively doing something; James is just lying there.

He can’t touch himself; of course he can’t touch himself. He knew that aspect was coming. He had planned it. He feels so close and on edge, but knows he won’t come without being touched, however good this makes him feel. 

He tries to move his hands, still tied together, back down from above his head, but Ed spots him and stops moving in order to firmly hold down his hands and James, damp-eyed, cries out in frustration.

“I’ll take care of you,” Ed says, and James nods, twisting against the bedsheets.

When Ed goes back in, he doesn’t stop, and it’s better than James could have imagined. When Ed’s breaths start coming more harshly, he stays on his knees, lets go of James’s legs and gets his firm hand on James’s cock, stroking hard. James tries to say that he’s getting close but can hardly manage to coherently voice it, and on another of Ed’s deep thrusts he’s coming hard over himself and Ed’s hand. A few moments later, Ed moans out as he comes, his hand tight enough on James’s hips to bruise.

They stay like that, panting, unmoving, for a few moments, then Ed manages to gather himself, pulling out — James winces — then carefully untying James’s hands. James watches in a daze, reflecting on what they’ve managed to do, as Ed knots the condom and goes to the ensuite and back to put it in the bin. He returns with a flannel and cleans James’s belly, looking down at him softly before flopping into bed beside him.

“You liked it,” James says accusatorily. 

“Of course I _liked_ it,” Ed says, rolling his eyes. “‘Local man enjoys repeatedly putting his dick into attractive person until orgasm is achieved; more at eleven.”

“I didn’t mean that,” James says, choosing to ignore for now the ‘attractive person’ part of Ed’s response. “I meant you liked seeing me all teary and messed up.”

“‘s not a crime,” Ed mutters sleepily into the pillow, and James gives a tiny, thoughtful smile.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Micah 7:19 (KJV)
> 
> Full prompt text:  
>  _So James talks a lot about being raised Christian and how it's led to him having a lot of shame about basically everything and I'd just really love to see some fic about how that might affect his sex life. Maybe he has a kink that he really hates himself for, and then he finds someone who encourages him to indulge in it and reassures him that it's all okay?_
> 
> _Lots of beating himself up for being Dirty and Wrong, and maybe some crying after he's finally given into it because it's such a relief to finally just let go?_


End file.
